from
http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_moore.html
Alan Moore: So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that. As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism. This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.
The Beat: Yeah, it does seem to be a common element.
Moore: It does seem to rather be a badge they wear.Whereas, what I was trying to do was take these two extremes of the human political spectrum and set them against each other in a kind of little moral drama, just to see what works and what happened. I tried to be as fair about it as possible. I mean, yes, politically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it. They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys.
At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. I was very pleased with how it came together. And it was a book that was very, very close to my heart.
...
At this point, I said that's it I'm not working for DC again and also I still want my name off this film, if they don't take my name off this film, I will be taking my name off the books, because it means that much to me to sever my connection with this whole painful business.
The Beat: But, Alan, isn't that throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
Moore: Well, I don't own the baby anymore, Heidi! The baby is one I put a great deal of love into, a great deal of passion and then during a drunken night it turned out that I'd sold it to the gypsies and they had turned out my baby into a life of prostitution. Occasionally they would send me increasingly glossy and well-produced pictures of my child as she now was, and they would very, very kindly send me a cut of the earnings. This may sound melodramatic, but I've been writing for 25 years and I think that the passion with which I write is probably evident—it's not faked. I really do feel intensely passionate about nearly everything I write. Obviously, it's going to vary, but I try to be passionate about everything I write. In some cases I succeed. V for Vendetta was one of those cases. It's that—I mean for 20 years since then, it's been a kind of a dull ache that the regular paychecks of our cut of the money don't really do an awful lot to assuage.
Oh, and here's another great interview:
http://www.enginecomics.co.uk/interviews/jan05/alanmoore.htm
but killer verbage nonetheless:
